Archive By Section - World

LOS ANGELES - Audiences knew what they wanted this weekend: Nicholas Cage and the apocalypse.

Summit Entertainment's supernatural thriller "Knowing," which stars Cage as an astrophysics professor who figures out how to predict monumental catastrophes, debuted as the No. 1 movie at the weekend box office with $24.8 million in ticket sales, according to studio estimates Sunday.

BUTTE, Mont. - A small plane - possibly carrying children on a ski trip - crashed Sunday as it approached the Butte airport, killing 14 to 17 people aboard, a federal official said. The single engine turboprop nose-dived into a cemetery 500 feet from its destination.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Astronauts successfully unfurled the newly installed solar wings at the international space station Friday, a nerve-racking procedure that went exceedingly well and brought the orbiting outpost to full power.

DALLAS - Workers at a high school staged cage fights among troubled students, making them settle their differences with bare-knuckled brawls in a steel utility cage inside a boys locker room, school district documents show.

WASHINGTON - Former Vice President Dick Cheney said Sunday that Americans are less safe now that President Barack Obama has overturned Bush terrorism-fighting policies and that nearly all the Republican administration's goals in Iraq have been achieved.

"There is no prospect" that Iraq will return to producing weapons of mass destruction or supporting terrorists, Cheney asserted, "as long as it's a democratically governed country, as long as they have got the security forces they do now and a relationship with the United States."

WINNENDEN, Germany - A 17-year-old gunman dressed in black opened fire at his former high school in southwestern Germany on Wednesday, killing at least 15 people and injuring others before escaping, police said. But state officials say police caught up with him and fatally shot the gunman.

Helicopters searching for him crisscrossed the area, and police warned area residents not to pick anyone up in their cars. It was Germany's worst shooting since another teenage gunman killed 16 people and himself in another high school in 2002.

Authorities were working Wednesday to learn why a gunman set off on a rampage of at least nine slayings across two rural Alabama counties. Shocked, grieving residents hoped the answers weren't lost when he killed himself.

Tuesday's shootings in a mostly rural area near the Florida border were believed to be the work of Michael McLendon, who lived with his mother and once worked at a local metal plant.

NEW YORK - Wall Street got some good news from Citigroup, and responded with a huge rally.

Led by financial stocks, the market made its first big move upward in weeks Tuesday after Citigroup Inc. said it had operated at a profit during the first two months of the year. All the major indexes soared more than 4 percent, and the Dow Jones industrials at times shot up more than 300 points.

BAGHDAD - A suicide bomber struck Sunni and Shiite tribal leaders and high-ranking security officials touring a market after a reconciliation meeting west of Baghdad on Tuesday, killing 33 people. The attack raised concerns about a spike in violence as the U.S. military begins to drawn down its forces.

Despite the ongoing violence, the top U.S. commander in Iraq said he does not believe the Iraqi government will ask Americans to remain in the country past a 2011 deadline set by a security agreement between the two countries.

NEW YORK - Soon after New Yorker Geralyn Lucas was laid off from her television job in January, she took her 2-year-old son to the playroom of her apartment building. She realized she had never been there before.

Within minutes she had inadvertently broken all the cleanliness rules. "I wore shoes," confesses Lucas, 41. "I brought food. I changed his diaper. I didn't know those things weren't allowed."

FORT BRAGG, N.C. - Staff Sgt. Jason Jonas says when he goes to bed at night, he is terrified his medication will cause him to oversleep and miss morning roll call again.

His commanders are fully aware the paratrooper wounded in Afghanistan has been diagnosed with a sleep disorder, because he is one of about 10,000 soldiers assigned to the Army's Warrior Transition units, created for troops recovering from injuries.